Tickets limted to 10. Book your ticket HERE
“Mosses and other small beings issue an invitation to dwell for a time right at the limits of ordinary perception.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss
This workshop will provide participants with a guided, slow looking experience of Fiona McDonald’s solo exhibition Inhale Exhale: Ecologies that Refuse to Behave.. The workshop will be seeded by Fiona McDonald, in conversation with poet Jessica Foley, who will suggest looking and writing prompts and facilitate a meditation.
The workshop will be themed around the carbon cycle of peatlands, as Fiona explains:
Peatlands store vast quantities of carbon, yet when drained they release CO₂ into the atmosphere. The workshop opens a discussion on the carbon cycle, measurement, and ecological time, inviting contributors — including peatland researchers — to reflect on how language can register environmental change.
Informed by slow time spent observing elements such as the radial bézier data driven animations and giclee prints which trace daily CO₂ rhythms, participants will collectively develop a distilled lexicon of four-letter words — flux, sink, peat, time, care. The constraint echoes the 14 segment alphanumeric radio displays embedded in the exhibition. While the texts will not be uploaded during the session, they are conceived as potential transmissions that could circulate across the feather radio receivers in future iterations of the work.
Writing materials will be provided, but please feel free to bring your own notebook if preferred.
Bio
Jessica Foley is a poet from Offaly, living and working, in North Dublin City. Her multimodal practice draws upon visual and conceptual art, education and ecology, and histories and practices of communication. Her work is informed by conceptual and installation art, and by experimental practices in art, film-making and writing, and socio-technical research in telecommunications. Her writing and research emerges through imaginative call and response, with people and place, through processes of deep listening, slow looking, embodied improvisation and play.
She is currently Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT).
Image: Fiona Mc Donald, Cloud Chamber (868MHz Transmitter), 2026, Ultraviolet grow light, electronics, custom software, LoRa radio, acrylic enclosure, linear actuator, CO₂ sensor, circulation fans, 14 segment display, living sphagnum capillifolium (red bog-moss), Photography Mark Stedman.
